What are some methods (e.g weekly company-wide emails) that the PMM team helps to keep the entire company informed on what was released this past week/month and the upcoming releases? How do you get the Product teams to help contribute to these updates?
There have been scenarios in the past where different teams (e.g customer success) across the company were not informed of releases promptly and it caused a lot of confusion/chaos.
2 Answers
Stephanie Zou
Figma Senior Director, Marketing • December 4
I believe that it’s the PMM’s responsibility to make sure your internal teams are informed about a release. If your internal teams aren’t well-versed in what’s new, how do you expect your external customers to be?
Some things we currently do:
- Setup Slack channel(s) for release updates and launches that everyone at the company can join and follow along
- Enable sales, support, success (basically any customer-facing team) at an opportune learning time (their time zone, not Monday mornings or Friday afternoons). For a release that introduces substantial change to the product, processes, or customer experience, you may need to do multiple enablement sessions. For smaller updates, a short Slack post in the sales team channel will do.
- Dog food your own feature. The best internal communication and marketing tool is using your own feature.
- Get your whole company excited. I am a big believer in internal marketing before a public launch. So you can think about doing things like presenting at lunch and learns/all hands, making posters, or organizing an internal celebration.
As we get bigger, I would probably introduce things like internal newsletters and more in-depth enablement programs and certifications.
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Priya Kotak
Figma Product Marketing • February 24
Methods for keeping everyone up to date will vary from company to company, based on the communication norms in place. At Figma, here are some of the ways we keep internal teams up-to-date today:
- Push out internal comms: At Figma, we primarily use Slack over email. We have a channel called #product-launches that PMMs update on launch day so that everyone in the company has visibility into what’s launching and can chime in with any questions or concerns as the feature rolls out. Every Friday, we also summarize the past week's releases and upcoming launches in this channel. In addition to Slack, we have weekly meetings to keep GTM teams in the loop about upcoming releases, and monthly launch calendar reviews where we review the quarterly launch calendar with Product and marketing leads.
- Maintain a single source of truth: As we’ve gotten bigger, its become increasingly important to have a single source of truth where anyone can go to see the latest launch dates. We plan all of our launches in Asana and make sure they’re integrated into our marketing team calendar which includes important milestones across all of our channels.
- Internal marketing/education: In addition keeping everyone in the loop, we also want to get folks excited about upcoming launches and new features. We often spotlight larger launches at our company meeting to generate this excitement — these presentations are a cross-functional effort between product, engineering, and go-to-market. We also partner with product to enable our Sales team, encouraging them to share the news with customers.
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